Australia just became the starting point of a Ben Gurion attack plot
2 hours ago · 9 October 2026Share
A Boeing 737-800 aircraft on the ground in Moscow. File photo. SmallSonMarex · CC0
Hamam al-Hammami tried to crash Flydubai Flight FZ1073 into Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport ten days ago.
So where did this actually start? Not in Syria. Not in the cockpit. It started in Melbourne, Australia.
The UAE's top prosecutor, Dr Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, said a day ago that al-Hammami's radicalisation goes back to 2017. That's three years before his known trips to Syria. Nine years before he picked up the plane's emergency crash axe and attacked Captain Smit Machchhar in the cockpit.
Here's what he was doing in Melbourne. He studied mechanical engineering at RMIT University from 2015 to 2017, on a student visa granted in 2014. He never finished the degree.
And while he was there, he regularly went to a mosque linked to RMIT. That's where he met people connected to an Islamic centre called MyCentre, also known as IISNA.
MyCentre is run by Samir Mohtadi, known as Abu Hamza. Lebanese descent, raised in Australia. He ran the centre then. He runs it now.
Mohtadi has made repeated public statements about Israel. In one sermon, he called on Allah to says quote "cast terror into the hearts of the Zionists". He has also described Zionists in dehumanising terms in a sermon and on social media, according to Ynetnews.
So that's an Australian imam, running a government-registered Islamic centre, using language that calls an entire group of people subhuman.
But here's the part that matters. Investigators have not established that Mohtadi or MyCentre had anything to do with al-Hammami's radicalisation, or with the attack itself.
What's actually confirmed is narrower. Al-Hammami says he met people linked to the centre while attending the nearby mosque. Nobody has said Mohtadi met him, taught him, or knew anything about what he was planning. Mohtadi has not commented.
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A panorama of the Melbourne skyline from Yarra's Edge, Docklands at twilight. File photo. Diliff · CC BY 2.5
And this is only one part of a bigger Australian investigation. The Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team — the Australian Federal Police, Victoria Police and the domestic spy agency ASIO — confirmed six days ago that it's looking into al-Hammami's Australian links.
The Financial Times has reported, citing two people familiar with the investigation, that al-Hammami visited radical mosques and extremist websites while in the country. Australian intelligence already had a file on him.
So this wasn't a surprise to Australian authorities. He was flagged before the attack ever happened.
After Melbourne, his path ran through several countries. He worked at Oman Air for about seven years, before being taken off flying duties after extremist material was found on him. He did a distance-learning aviation management course at Buckinghamshire New University in the UK, with no pilot training there. He trained at Royal Air Maroc in 2025. He joined Flydubai in January this year.
UAE investigators say he flew to Tel Aviv twice beforehand, just to study the route and the airport. Dr Al Shamsi says the plan was inspired by the September 11 2001 attacks. The goal, he says, was to crash the jet into Ben Gurion Airport's passenger terminal and cause maximum deaths.
Al-Hammami says he acted alone. Investigators are still checking for accomplices.
Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said the co-pilot went through what he called Islamist radical indoctrination.
So what don't we know? How much the Melbourne years actually mattered. Investigators haven't tied Mohtadi or his centre to anything. And they haven't said whether they've even interviewed Mohtadi himself. New Zealand police are separately looking at time al-Hammami spent there, though that detail only comes from one report so far.
For now, here's the clearest fact in the whole case. A radicalisation that investigators now say started in an Australian university city in 2017. Nine years before an attempted attack on an airport more than 11,000 kilometres away.
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